Here is your sign Florida…

I have been pondering the recent Mid-Term elections and thinking about what I see as the real meaning of the results. I put this in the Florida Politics area for the simple reason that I am just going to give my opinion, at this point, of the results as they pertain to Florida.

I would start out with a question. Where were %60 of the voters who did not vote? I have not found the percentages, by party, of who did not vote. Were they mostly Republicans, or Democrats?

As a Republican I vote a Republican, Democrat, or Independent, all depending on the idea of which one was best for Florida. It has gotten hard to tell who, in any election, will be best as they all, for the most part, throw mud at their opponent, which, of course, middies up the waster. It would be nice if they at least told the truth but, they seem to be telling the “best lie there is”, in that while there is a lot of truth in the add there is also enough falsehood to confuse things. Sound bites that attack an opponent are not, in themselves, bad but they purposely don’t tell the whole story.

Going back a few years to the primary where, Vern Buchanan would be put in office there was an attack ad that cast Vern, do you mind if I call you Vern, in office there was the allegation that he was a tax deadbeat, and refused to pay his federal taxes. The reply to this was that he had sent in a check for what he believed his taxes were, an attempt to pay, and it had been rejected by the I.R.S. If memory serves me correctly most of his tax burden was found to be unowed so, why should have be faulted for not wanting to pay what he did not owe? Why should the IRS believe they can charge fines and penalties for unowed taxes?

Back to my line.. Most voters, not being able to look up individual details, will vote by perception rather then fact and, many of these attack ads add to their perceptions. Many people get the perception that politicians are all crooks. It goes back to that old joke “how do you know when a politician is lying?” with the answer being “his mouth is moving.” When there results were in on the Jennings vs Buchanan election there were roughly 18,000 missing votes. The question was asked, “where these votes not counted by a Republican Supervisor of Elections, or where there really 18,000 people who voted “none of the above”? As a Republican I voted for Jennings because I was not happy with the tone of the ads during the Republican Primary which seemed to be mostly untruths.

I heard Michael Moore say that George Bush II was a lier because he told untruths and that it did not matter that the may have thought they were true. So if you tell me something that thought you knew, and it turns out to be untrue, then you are a liar.. That seems to be a rather simple concept.

Here in Florida, with %60 of the people not voting, we have elected Rick Scott for our new Governor inspite of his rather fishy past.

I realize that %40 of the people voted but, I wonder if the people they voted for, at least in the Republcian camp did not take this the wrong way. Perhaps it was not an endorsement of the Republican way but rather frustration with the idea that politicians just can’t seem to tell the truth.